Americans voting in the November 3 midterm elections will decide who controls Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, along with dozens of governorships and thousands of state offices.
The campaign is playing out against an unusually combustible mix of economic anxiety, war, immigration battles, corruption concerns and unease over rapidly expanding artificial intelligence. Polls asking voters about priorities use different methodologies, but they broadly agree on the dominance of pocketbook concerns. An October Pew survey found economic issues easily topped voters’ worries, while a September Emerson poll put the Iran war, jobs, tariffs, gas prices, immigration and AI regulation among the most important factors in voting decisions. Here are five issues shaping the midterms: Affordability remains issue number one.
Inflation was running at 3.7 percent in September, but the political problem goes beyond the headline rate, with voters paying more for gasoline, housing, electricity, groceries and borrowing. Pew found that 65 percent of Americans see Trump’s economic policies as hurtful to the economy.
Trump’s tariffs feed directly into the debate, with opponents blaming them for higher costs while the administration argues they protect American industry and raise revenue. A foreign war has become a domestic pocketbook issue. The conflict with Iran, underway since February, has driven energy costs higher and become deeply unpopular. The shift is particularly notable among Latinos. The president himself is an issue — including how he uses the office. Trump has explicitly asked voters to behave as though he were on the ballot, making the election partly a referendum on his second term. Government ethics ranked second behind the economy in Pew’s open-ended survey, cited by nine percent of voters. Democrats have promised investigations of Trump family business dealings if they win congressional subpoena power, although Republicans dismiss many such allegations as partisan attacks. Artificial intelligence has jumped out of the laptop and onto the campaign trail. Voters worry about job losses, safety and regulation — but increasingly also about the giant data centers needed to power AI . AI regulation scored surprisingly highly in Emerson’s September survey, just behind immigration and gas prices. Data centers themselves ranked lower nationally, but have become major campaign issues in states including Ohio as communities battle over electricity, water and construction. Transgender rights continue to produce fierce arguments over participation in women’s sports. Health care is also a perennial election concern, encompassing the cost of insurance and medicines, and access to coverage. These issues have not necessarily driven the national midterm campaign as strongly as affordability, Iran or immigration, but they remain powerful mobilizers for parts of both parties’ coalitions. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Another survey, from the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, found 57 percent placing groceries, gas or utilities among their top three issues. Emerson’s September survey rated the Iran war the single most important issue among those it tested, while Reuters/Ipsos found only 34 percent approving of Trump’s handling of the conflict. Reuters/Ipsos found 55 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Marist, meanwhile, found Democrats and Republicans essentially level on which party voters trusted more on the issue — a striking change from the clear Republican advantage of 2024. A survey across competitive House districts found 62 percent of Latino voters disapproved of the administration’s deportation and immigration enforcement. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll found 97 percent of Americans believed there was at least some corruption in the federal government. And 66 percent said they had little or no trust in Trump to avoid using the presidency to benefit his family’s businesses. Half of Americans told Pew they were very concerned about AI’s role in the economy, while 59 percent said they disliked political leaders supporting data centers in the respondents’ localities. Congress even spent some of its final pre-election days arguing over who should pay the electricity costs created by them — proof that, in 2026, even the server farm has become political.
Republican candidates in several competitive races have called for the fighting to end, and four Republican senators joined Democrats in a September vote seeking to rein it in. The strength of Trump’s signature political talking point has become more complicated. The president returned to office promising mass deportations, but support has eroded following controversy over deaths during arrests and detention, and aggressive ICE operations.
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